Charles Blaich of Wabash College was kind enough to send me a copy of an article he had co-authored with Ernest T. Pascarella, Ty M. Cruce, and Gregory C. Wolniak entitled "Do Liberal Arts Colleges Really Foster Good Practices in Undergraduate Liberal Arts Education?" It's in the Journal of College Student Development for January/February 2004 pp. 67 - 84, and is also available in .pdf format on the "Research" page of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College: http://www.liberalarts.wabash.edu/cila/research.

It's a blockbuster article but I bogged down at first in its methodological complexities and didn't see its significance. Gradually it became clear what the authors had done. They used a list of nineteen widely acknowledged best practices in undergraduate education and then studied data from sixteen colleges through the National Survey of Student Engagement to determine to what extent students in these institutions reported they had encountered these practices. (The list of practices includes various measures of student-faculty contact, co-operation among students, active learning, feedback, high expectations, quality of teaching, and interaction with other students.) The sixteen institutions were of three types - liberal arts colleges, research universities and regional universities. They were chosen so that each of the three types had a broad geographical range, different patterns of governance, selectivity, size etc. Statistical regressions were then used to remove the effects of these differences. For example, smaller size readily leads to high levels of contact among students and between faculty and students. Regression techniques make it possible to factor this out and thereby focus on the practices themselves.

When the responses were compared and analyzed students in the liberal arts colleges said more frequently than their counterparts in regional and research universities that they had encountering these best practices. And they said it emphatically and repeatedly. First year students in liberal arts colleges reported that they encountered thirteen of the 19 "best practices" more frequently than did their counterparts in regional universities. (It's not that the liberal arts colleges lagged in the other six indicators; there was just no statistically significant difference. When compared to responses from research universities the responses were even more dramatic - fourteen out of the nineteen were reported as more frequent in liberal arts colleges - yes, even after the regressions adjusted for effects of differences in size etc.

Raising the Bar: Then the researchers raised the bar by asking how frequently second year students in the various types of institutions had encountered these best practices. Had they experienced them more frequently than in their first year (even if the first year level was already very high, as it was in the liberal arts colleges)? Second year students at the liberal arts colleges frequently reported continued high levels of experience of the best practice indicators. In fact, in four indicators the difference between liberal arts colleges and regional universities was even greater than in the first year - this time difference could be seen in nine of the indicators. In other words, in the experience of second year students, all the previous high levels were maintained, and some additional differences were reported.

The bar was raised again as the responses of third year students were studied. The liberal arts college students reported increased frequency of encountering best practices over the preceding year and, in six of them, the differences were greater than those reported by students at the research universities.

It's important to recognize the limits of the study. The sample of institutions studied, to be sure, is very small, and the data only tell us what students report, not what actually happens. Furthermore funds ran out before the fourth year of undergraduate experience could be analyzed. From the pattern evidence in the first three years, one can hypothesize that all of the initial 14 out of 19 best practice indicators would continue to be reported at a higher level by the liberal arts college students, though perhaps only a few at a level higher than experienced in their third year. However, it would be nice to test that hypothesis.

A Gold Standard? But when all the limitations are properly recognized and all the qualifications expressed, these are dramatic results. If they are correct, liberal arts colleges may be the gold standard for undergraduate education. What's more, as Mr. Blaich pointed out to me, the frequency of these good practices is "not related to institutional selectivity. That is, humble liberal arts colleges are just as good at doing this as are highly selective, wealthy institutions." While we may wonder whether those wealthy institutions are using their resources as effectively as possible, that question shouldn't distract us from the accomplishments of undergraduate colleges as standard setters.

Implications: Where does the article lead? The $64,000 question remains - do all these good practices actually result in improved student learning? Perhaps students at liberal arts colleges are right in reporting a very nurturing educational environment, but when it comes right down to it, sink or swim, maybe their counterparts in other types of institutions have learned just as much. This may seem unlikely, but one would like to know. There's a need to systematically compare the levels of student engagement as reported in the National Survey of Student Engagement and the outcomes achieved as measured by well crafted instruments of assessment, such as the College Learning Assessment. In the meantime, though, exports and imports need to be tended to:

Exports: There's clearly something in the culture of many undergraduate liberal arts colleges that values these educational best practices. Other institutions can readily go down the list of good practices, use NSSE data to see how well they are doing, and then find ways to do better. But they may need to do something more difficult - find out what it is in the culture of liberal arts colleges that makes these good practices such a regular part of their life. Liberal arts colleges, in other words, ought to be exporters of a special kind of academic culture. (This is already happening in some American public universities, and overseas as well, but that's another story.)

Imports: While liberal arts colleges, if this study is accurate, can justly claim to provide a gold standard for American undergraduate education, there's no room for complacency. On some of the good practice indicators liberal arts colleges do not seem to significantly outperform research and regional universities - not that they underperform; they just don't do significantly better. So there's room for improvement in these areas. Can liberal arts colleges find ways to de even better in developing the scholarly and intellectual qualities of their students, their critical and evaluative capacities and, above all, their creativity? Can they further enhance the quality of interaction among their students and the link between those interactions and the academic goals of the institution? And can they find better ways to involve students in faculty research and discussions that reflect the current state of best thinking in various fields? This may involve importing some practices that have worked well in research universities, and adapting them to the distinctive settings of the undergraduate colleges. There's a lot to be done in every institution of higher education, and no sector owns all the gold.

W. R. Connor

13 December 2004

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